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Twitter Names Jeffrey Siminoff as New Diversity Chief

• gnicholas 11y ago
  >Mr. Miley wrote that black adults accounted for about a quarter of Twitter’s users, but that black employees made up about 2 percent of the company’s work force. Statistics fail: Mr. Miley wrote—quoting a Pew study—that 27% of African Americans who use the internet use Twitter. The NYT confuses the denominator and ends up with the unbelievable claim that a quarter of Twitter users are African American. In fact, only 20% of all Twitter users are even American[1], and as of 2014, only 18% of US Twitter users were African American[2]. So the true percentage is 3.6%, not "about a quarter." And even if the NYT meant to refer to just US users, they overstated the case by nearly half (25% versus 18%). 1: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2159420/twitter-users-to-grow-244-percent-in-2014-us-still-largest-market.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2159420/twitter-users-to-grow... 2: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304419104579323442346646168 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023044191045793234... Note: although the NYT uses the term "black," the cited source talks about "African Americans." So even though "black" could be used to refer to non-US people, in this case it was in reference to African Americans only.